Try baking bread in a meat roaster with a top. This keeps the bread from Prune pies are improved by adding one teaspoonful of vinegar to each pie. Prunes are rather flat tasting so the vinegar cuts the sweetness.
On making cake wben fresh milk, buttermilk, molasses, and sour milk, are lacking, use a cup of apple sauce into which has been stirred a tea spoonful of baking soda. Besides be ing an excellent- substitute, the sauce makes a delicious spice cake, and without eggs, too.
When spreading butter on sand wiches or toast, do not try to soften the butter, but heat a silver knife by placing it in boiling water. The diffi culty is overcome at once.
When a recipe calls for sugar and flour, instead of moistening the flour with water or milk, stir flour and sug ar together in the dry state. Then no lumps will be seen.
If one cannot afford much cream whert making ice cream, a small quan tity will go faxther and be richer if whipped or scalded. In summer, milk sherbet, made with lemons and gela tin, is inexpensive, very delicious, and a refresbing substitute for cream.
Much can be done at night in prep aration for breakfast. For instance, if baked potatoes are to be included in the menu, wash them; and sift flour or meal for muffins.
When we bake apples in the usual way, after coring and putting in sug ar and water, the juice runs into the dish and, is burned or wasted, as it naturally will not stay in the hole. Af ter coring, cut the apple in two, and make the center of the trench in the apple deeper; fill it with sugar, laying the cut half of each one upwards.
To economize stove space when making rice soup I place a cup con taining the rice in the soup kettle. It serves the purpose of a double boiler. It also prevents scorching or the soup boiling over, the latter generally being caused by the addition.of rice.
To keep cheese moist, wrap it in a soft cloth wrung out of vinegar, and keep in an earthen jar, with the cover slightly raised.
To clean lettuce is often a nuisance, because of tiny green insects or their eggs in it. Turn on the cold water faucet slightly, put your thurab against it so the stream squirts with force, and hold each leaf, with the broad end in the hand, under the water for a few seconds. Rinse, and it is ready for the table.
In the cooking departments of wom en's magazines, I find one class of housekeepers completely ignored, per haps unwittingly. It comprises the millions who inhabit lofty plateaus and mountains. Perhaps lowland women do not know that we who come to these high altitudes (Tellur ide, Colorado), have to learn all over again how to cook. I have seen hun dreds of recipes in cookbooks and magazines that would fail altogether here. For instance--I have boiled po tatoes in Ohio (near the sea level) in twenty-five minutes. In Denver, at an altitude of five thousand feet, it takes thirty-five minutes. In Leadville, Col orado, at ten thousand feet, forty-five minutes. This is because of water boiling at a lower temperature in high altitudes. Where I now live, at an altitude of nine thousand feet, I boil potatoes nearly an hour in water merely at the boiling point, and find they are not tender, so the water must be much hotter than at the boiling point to cook them. Other vegetables must be cooked longer. It is impossi ble to cook until tender some of the garden peas that are on sale here in the summer, and we have to depend almost wholly on factory canned peas.
A woman must learn over again to bake cake if she has just come from a low altitude. No Eastern cookbook can be depended upon. The ladies of this town have published a cookbook of their own reliable recipes. It is eagerly bought by newcomers from low altitudes. In baking cake, you must use more flour and less short ening.
Nothing else sweetens vessels in which milk has been kept so well as a solution of baking soda and hot wa ter, in the proportion of a level tea spoonful to a quart of warm water. Let the solution stand in the vessels long enough to get cold. Pudding dishes or pots and pans which have been burned are easily cleaned this way.
If the refrigerator is stored away and the cellar is warm from the heat ing plant there, an excellent way to keep lettuce crisp and tender, is to wrap each head separately in a piece of old linen, wet in cold water. Mois ten the linen every day, and you can keep lettuce for two weeks. The in ner leaves be yellow and crisp, and there will be no wasting of outer leaves.